Re: Bad Man Page URLs

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Apr 6, 2012, 02:32 UTC
Message-ID: <20120406023223.GB16264@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <2AC038A1-3D8D-425E-92B3-DADFD027761A@justatheory.com>

On Thu, Apr 05, 2012 at 06:48:19PM -0700, David E. Wheeler wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> I noticed this in 1.7.7.3, but just rebuilt 1.7.9.6 from source on OS
> X Lion and am still seeing it. These are the links at the end of `man
> git`:
> [...]
> >         1. Everyday Git
> >            file:///home/junio/share/doc/git-doc/everyday.html

The problem is that you are not really rebuilding the manpages at all, but rather just untarring prebuilt copies. If you built them yourself, they would have the proper prefix for your system.

That being said, it would be nice for the prebuilt manpages to have something more location-agnostic in them. These links are generated by asciidoc's "link:" directive. The HTML versions properly use relative links, but the links are expanded into full URLs for the manpages. Which makes sense, since there's no concept of a relative link here.

So we can tweak it by using a custom link macro (we already have "linkgit" for linking to actual commands). But what should the agnostic version say? Just saying "look at everday.html in the git documentation" is not as nice as a real URL, but we really don't have any more information than that. Maybe they should be pointing to some canonical version on the web?

> Is there a bug reporting system I should report this to?

This list, and you just did. :)

-Peff